User interfaces change state. An email client might have online/offline views and might display emails in full/collapsed views. At a more granular level, a CheckBox control might have states like checked, unchecked, enabled, disabled and so on. This screencast looks at how the Silverlight UI model handles state changes.

The notion of controls transitioning between states is at the heart of the Silverlight UI model. In this video we'll show how we can build a "popout panel" in Expression Blend by defining visual states for our user interface, the animation transitions between them and the interactive behavior that causes those transitions to take place. All of this is done via drag-and-drop in the design tool.

Mike Taulty works in the Developer and Platform Group at Microsoft in the UK where he has spent the past few years helping developers understand and get the best from the Microsoft platform. Prior to this, Mike spent 3 years with Microsoft Consulting Services as a consultant on developer technologies. You can find more of a complete career history over on LinkedIn.